getting DooM shareware on 3.5"?

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hey all! This is my first post, but instead of making a typical intro thread first, I thought i'd just go ahead and ask a dumb question.(yay!)

Anyways, something that has been bothering me for a long time is the lack of DooM on my old 486dx Epson laptop. The only problem is it can't connect to the intarweb, and only has a floppy drive.

I have Many blank floppies laying around, and my question is this: How can I make my doom shareware fit on at least 2 or more blank 3.5" floppy diskettes? Mostly the WAD is giving me problems considering it is 4mb+ (and still large, even with compression), and a diskette can only hold 1.44, or 1.68 with that old MS hack.

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If you use a program like WinRAR, there should be an option that you can span an archive into several pieces (one of the presets divides the archive into floppy-sized chunks). Rarlab also has a DOS command-line version of the RAR extractor, which can extract any archive that WinRAR creates.

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DaniJ said:
Erm, you do realize that the original DOOM shareware install fitted on a single floppy anyway

Maybe a single 2.88MB floppy, but I've never seen one of those in real life. It ordinarily took 2 1.44MB disks; just get doom19s.zip and put deice.exe, install.bat, dooms_19.dat, and dooms_19.1 on one, and dooms_19.2 on the other.

Place DOOM2_2S.2 on a floppy of its own, and all the others on another, and run install.bat from the latter, that should do the trick.

About file splitting...to save both time and space, don't even bother with ZIP, especially with DOS PKZIP:

it was (and is...) terrible at splitting large files into multiple archives (you needed 3rd party utilites to do that, and then they couldn't *really* split large files into smaller joinable chunks, but only rearrange WHOLE files inside a larger archive so that it could could be (sort of) split into separate archives), and before RAR became commonplace, ARJ was used instead (any good old w4r3z d00d knows that ;-) )

In other words, no file inside a "multivolume" ZIP archive could exceed the length of the volume it was stored in and continue on another, only ARJ could do that from the start.

Even when they (if ever) added true multivolume functionality to .ZIP, it was subfunctional and uncomparable with ARJ's (it requires multiple disk swaps instead of 1 pass on each volume, and it had almost no recovery and individual volume handling abilities: if one bit in one volume was ruined, then NO FILE could be extracted from any of the volumes).

(Yeah, this turned into a PKZIP rant, I know, but I can't help it if it sucked :-p)